Maturation of the gut metabolome during the first year of life in humans

ABSTRACT

The gut microbiota is involved in the production of numerous metabolites that maintain host wellbeing. The assembly of the gut microbiome is highly dynamic, and influenced by many postnatal factors, moreover, little is known about the development of the gut metabolome. We showed that geography has an important influence on the microbiome dynamics in the first year of life based on two independent cohorts from China and Sweden. Major compositional differences since birth were the high relative abundance of Bacteroides in the Swedish cohort and Streptococcus in the Chinese cohort. We analyzed the development of the fecal metabolome in the first year of life in the Chinese cohort. Lipid metabolism, especially acylcarnitines and bile acids, was the most abundant metabolic pathway in the newborn gut. Delivery mode and feeding induced particular differences in the gut metabolome since birth. In contrast to C-section newborns, medium- and long-chain acylcarnitines were abundant at newborn age only in vaginally delivered infants, associated by the presence of bacteria such as Bacteroides vulgatus and Parabacteroides merdae. Our data provide a basis for understanding the maturation of the fecal metabolome and the metabolic role of gut microbiota in infancy.

KEYWORDS:

• Gut microbiome
• gut metabolome
• delivery mode
• diet
• infant

Acknowledgments

We thank all the mothers and infants who participated in this study. We thank Prof. Dr. Fredrik Bäckhed for the critical discussions during the preparation of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Conceptualization, P.K.D, R.O. and X.L. (Xinyu Liu); methodology, P.K.D, R.O., F.Z., S.Z., Y.Y., Q.L. and X.W., formal analysis, P.K.D and R.O., investigation, X.M., Y.Z., R.C., Z.Z. and Z.L., resources, J.D., Y.H. and Z.R., writing – original draft, P.K.D and R.O., writing – review and editing, all authors; supervision, P.K.D, X.L. (Xinyu Liu), X.L. (Xin Lu) and G.X.; funding acquisition, G.X., X.L. (Xinyu Liu) and L.Z.

Data availability statement

The data for this study have been deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at EMBL-EBI under accession number PRJEB49858 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB49858), and the data for the Swedish cohort under PRJEB38986 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB38986). All data are available in the main text or the supplementary materials.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19490976.2023.2231596

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the foundation from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21934006); and the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences under the Innovation Program of Science and Research (DICP I201918, DICP I202019); and the Chinese Academy of Sciences under the Youth Innovation Promotion Association (2021186); and the Scientific and Technological Office of Dalian under the Dalian Youth Science and Technology Star Project Support Program (2020RQ067).